DNF at 60%

Burn Bright  - Marianne de Pierres

Here’s the thing, you can take an overused trope and put it in an edgy outfit, maybe surround it with a unique setting and add in some Dafuq Am I Reading, but guess what? It’s still a goddamn trope. And this book has a lot of them. 


There’s the TSTL Mary Sue MC, the bestie who is much cooler and more badass than her, mean girls, a beta male who’s interested in Mary, powerful preternatural males that are interested in Mary, a handsome boy that is interested in Mary and – FUCK! WE GET IT, THEY’RE ALL INTERESTED IN MARY! Oh and let’s not forget that only attractive people are trustworthy, it’s not okay to be sexually active and you should always be suspicious and wary of unknown females. Finish this off with a dash of super speshul snowflake and I quit. 


I’m pissed, I really wanted to like this one. Even the creative setting and the fact that it seemed like everyone was perpetually mid-acid trip weren’t enough to keep me interested. 

I felt like this book was trying for creepy, what with the shadows that roiled just at the edge of the character’s peripherals and the random creatures that lurked in the darkness, but even that fell flat. I just wanted…more. These things weren’t dwelled on for long enough and so there wasn’t enough detail to make it actually suspenseful. At best it made me think ‘Oh, what was that?’ That’s it, mild curiosity, for the meh.

Lastly we have all the WTFery. There were random words dropped that were never explained, hints of other lands and other peoples that really could have been fleshed out to greater extent so that I actually had some sort of idea what the world was like outside of the MC’s incredibly limited knowledge, a plot that seemed to wander all over the place and ‘twists’ I saw coming from fifty pages away. 

I'm going to stop bitching now because I really could complain about almost everything in this book but I can recognize that most of my frustration comes from disappointment so I won't subject you to a drawn out rant. Moral of the story? The hype is a lying sonofabitch. 

 

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